Ralph Waldo Emerson understood his countrymen only too well when he wrote, “Every hero becomes a bore at last.” After all, within his own lifetime Emerson would see both Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant cut down to size. There is no place in American life for the enduring national cult of a hero, no equivalent of France’s national passion for Napoleon (a cult strangely enough by no means limited to the French), England’s sentimental hero worship of Nelson (and, increasingly, of Winston Churchill), Russia’s glorification of Peter the Great.

Perhaps it is the price of being a democracy, and of a deep, inherent distrust of the very idea of an elite—we are all egalitarians at heart, or at least feel a need to pay homage to the idea of equality. We have a natural tendency to nibble away at the great figures of the past; to dig through their lives for flaws, mistakes, and weaknesses; to judge them severely by the standards and beliefs of the present, rather than those that prevailed when they were alive. Thus Washington has been marginalized as a dead white male, and as a slave owner, and remembered more for his ill-fitting false teeth than his generalship. Thus Jefferson has been downgraded from his lofty position as the author of the Declaration of Independence to being treated not merely as a slave owner, but as a spendthrift and hypocrite who slept with his own female slaves. Thus Grant’s tomb stood for many decades forlorn and almost unvisited on Riverside Drive and 122nd Street in New York City, despite the fact that it was, until the end of the nineteenth century, a bigger tourist attraction than the Statue of Liberty.

It is a simple fact of American life, this urge to splash graffiti on the pantheon of our heroes. In other countries—or cultures—the building up of national heroes is a full-time job, respected and well rewarded, in France with membership in the Académie Française and the Légion d’Honneur, in the United Kingdom with knighthoods and a cozy place in the cultural establishment; but in ours, whole profitable segments of the media and publishing industries prosper by tearing them down. Sic transit gloria mundi might as well be our national motto.

In his own lifetime, for example, Dwight D. Eisenhower underwent a rapid transition from world-class, five-star hero to being ridiculed as an old fuddy-duddy in the White House, out of touch with what was happening in the country, more interested in his golf score than in politics, deaf to the pleas of civil rights leaders (or at least hard of hearing), and, toward the end of his eight years as president, overshadowed by the youth and glamour of the young John F. Kennedy.

It was not just journalists, or editorial cartoonists like Herblock in the Washington Post, or intellectuals of the New Frontier, who made fun of Ike—even historians of World War II began to turn their heavy guns on him, particularly admirers of General George S. Patton. Patton’s advocates formed a stubborn and robust revisionist cult that would reach its peak when Patton became the hero of Richard Nixon’s favorite movie; they held Ike to blame for failing to turn his fractious subordinate loose to seize Berlin before the Russians did, and by that mistake ensuring a divided Germany and the cold war—even though Patton was too far south to have done this.

Like those revisionists who insist that Blücher, instead of Wellington, won the Battle of Waterloo by arriving on the battlefield with his Prussians at the end of the day, or those who believe that Lee would have won the Battle of Gettysburg if only he had listened to Longstreet’s advice, Patton’s admirers—sixty years after the fact—are still smarting over their hero’s complaints. As to the validity of their views, one cannot do better than to quote the duke of Wellington himself, who, when a stranger came up to him on Piccadilly and said, “Mr. Jones, I presume?” is said to have replied, “If you presume that, sir, you’d presume any damned thing.”

The guns had hardly fallen silent in Europe before Eisenhower’s rivals and subordinates sat down to write their memoirs or edit their diaries for publication. Most of them were sharply critical of Eisenhower. On the British side of the Grand Alliance the newly ennobled field marshals Lord Alanbrooke and Viscount Montgomery, and General Lord Ismay, if they agreed on nothing else, were united in their view that Eisenhower was no strategist. Indeed General Sir Alan Brooke, as he was then, the acerbic Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), would remark acidly in his dairy in 1943 on the subject of his plan for the invasion, “Eisenhower has got absolutely no strategical outlook.”¹

On the losing side, Hitler’s generals, when they came to write their memoirs, were almost all critical of Eisenhower’s caution, slowness, conventional tactics, and failure to develop the single thrust that might have brought the war to an end by the winter of 1944—strong stuff from those whom he defeated.

As for the senior American and British airmen—particularly the “bomber barons,” among whom the most important and outspoken was Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur (“Bomber”) Harris, Air Officer Commanding, RAF Bomber Command—they expressed in their war memoirs the conviction that had they been given a free hand and unlimited resources the war could have been won in 1944 without an invasion at all; that Eisenhower, in short, had merely wasted time, manpower, money, and fuel, all of which would have been more usefully employed destroying German cities (the RAF strategy), or the German rail network and oil industry (the strategy of the U.S. Army Air Force).

In the United States, enthusiasts for a Pacific-first strategy—centered on the figure of General Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. Navy admirals, most of whom had never wholeheartedly accepted Franklin Roosevelt’s agreement with Churchill that the defeat of Nazi Germany, not Japan, must be the Allies’ first priority—accused Eisenhower of spinelessly allowing himself to be charmed, bullied, or hoodwinked by the wily British; it was not only the French who distrusted l’Albion perfide. Perhaps fortunately, the Soviet marshals alone did not offer much in the way of criticism of Ike, presumably afraid to express any opinions on the matter that might contradict those of Stalin.

Of course to some degree all wars end in a war of words—World War I produced innumerable ill-tempered memoirs from the generals on both sides of the conflict, justifying their own decisions and lamenting the blunders of their colleagues, not to speak of politicians blaming the generals for what had gone wrong on the battlefield, and generals blaming the politicians for interfering in military decisions about which no civilian was qualified to hold an opinion and for botching the peace.

In the United Kingdom, certain events of World War I, most particularly the First Battle of the Somme and the failure of the landings in the Dardanelles, caused a veritable heavy artillery barrage of books which still rumbles on today, and which aroused bitter feelings that were not submerged even by the outbreak of the next world war in 1939.

In France, there were numerous equally sore points on the subject of World War I among the rival generals and politicians. Many of these disputes were exacerbated by a universal national feeling that the British had not pulled their weight in the fighting and had then conspired to cheat France out of its just rewards at the peace conference—l’Albion perfide again.

In Germany, of course, the burning question was who was responsible for losing the war; and in all the countries involved, even the infant Soviet Union, whole forests were felled to print books seeking to pin elsewhere the blame for starting it in the first place.

Thus the attempt to take some of the luster off Eisenhower’s five stars was nothing out of the ordinary in history, though it must be said that he bore the attacks and the second-guessing of his British colleagues with a degree of patience that might almost have qualified him for sainthood, however much he steamed about them in private. His own war memoirs are notably fair-minded, even on the subject of people he had every reason to resent, and he did not attempt to refute criticism of himself, or encourage others to do so on his behalf.

Still, in Eisenhower’s case the natural tendency of the historical pendulum to swing in the opposite direction after a certain amount of time coincided with the growing feeling during his second term in office that he was out of his depth as president, and that like another victorious American general, Ulysses S. Grant, he regarded the presidency more as a reward for his victory in the field than as the summit of his ambition or a full-time job. His soothing grandfatherly style, his unconcealed distaste for the rough-and-tumble of politics, and his garbled syntax played well enough in the heartland but did not appeal to right-wing Republicans who regarded Ike as a newcomer to the GOP (and distrusted his bias toward the United Kingdom and Europe), or to the young and the big-city intellectual elites, who had supported Adlai Stevenson and were now beginning to feel the gravitational pull of the young, vigorous, and articulate junior senator from Massachusetts.

To put matters in perspective, the last years of Eisenhower’s presidency coincided with the Beats, Mort Sahl, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis—things were happening out there beyond the White House and Camp David that would change America more radically than anything since the Civil War, and it cannot be said that Eisenhower was aware of them, or had he been aware, that he would have approved.

The 1950s still conjure up today a world that seems far removed from our own, even to those of us who came of age in it: men wearing hats, and suits with narrow lapels; huge tail-finned cars gleaming with chrome; the dizzyingly rapid growth of the suburbs; the fiction of women as happy, contented housewives; McCarthyism; the height of the cold war; an age when cigarettes weren’t considered harmful, the pill had yet to be invented, skirts came down below the knee, and conformity—at least on the surface—ruled.

Eisenhower presided over this America, benign, avuncular, occasionally exasperated. His idea of a good evening was said to be watching old westerns on television, he and Mrs. Eisenhower seated side by side in front of the set with a television tray in front of each of them; his idea of a good meal, a Scotch on the rocks and a steak. Those who disliked the Eisenhowers spread rumors that Mrs. Eisenhower drank more than was good for her and was sometimes unsteady on her feet, while those who admired them believed that she merely suffered from an inner ear imbalance and a certain shyness, or caution, in the presence of politicians, natural in a woman who had spent her married life as an Army wife, and was therefore used to a world in which officers junior to her husband—and their wives—knew their place and took good care to stay in it.

Although Eisenhower, with his big grin, looked like a gregarious soul, this was in part a facade, or a protective mechanism, like a lot of things about him. Decades after serving two terms as his vice president, Richard Nixon still complained that in eight years the Eisenhowers had seldom invited the Nixons to a private dinner at the White House, just the four of them together—a subject about which Mrs. Nixon was said to express, to the very end of her life, what was, for her, a very rare degree of personal resentment. Of course in many respects Eisenhower remained a general, even as president, and generals don’t usually invite junior officers to dine with them. Nixon may well have appeared to him to be the equivalent of a junior officer, and in any case political small talk, which was Nixon’s specialty, was the last thing Eisenhower wanted to hear in the evening, or even during the day—more likely, he simply preferred to spend his evenings in front of the television set when he could, like so many of his fellow Americans who had elected him president, and perhaps it simply never occurred to him that the Nixons’ feelings might be hurt, or even that their feelings mattered one way or the other.

A lifetime in the Army and several years of supreme command inevitably make a certain imprint on a man, and lead to things that mere civilians find it hard to understand. Robert Kennedy used to tell a story about his brother’s shock, when he reached the White House, at how much it cost to run, and how many people worked there without anybody seeming to know what, if anything, they did. President Kennedy had, to a serious degree, a rich man’s horror at the possibility that he might be accused of extravagance or waste—a subject about which those who have inherited wealth are often particularly sensitive. He told his brother Robert to go into the question of White House staffing with a fine-tooth comb, and to find ways to economize.

During the course of this investigation—for Robert Kennedy plunged into it with his usual zeal and thirst for details—he discovered that nobody could explain the presence of an Army master sergeant who had an office in the basement of the White House. He decided to look into this himself, and eventually discovered in the basement a grizzled old Army NCO in a large office, surrounded by canvases and optical equipment. Eisenhower, it turned out, had been persuaded by Winston Churchill to take up painting as a hobby to calm his nerves. He enjoyed painting, once he took it up, and was good with colors, but apparently he never developed a skill for drawing (a difficulty from which Churchill also suffered). On Churchill’s advice, he began by working from postcards, and had one of his orderly sergeants draw the outline of the picture to scale on the canvas.

When he was elected president, the sergeant was posted to the White House and installed in the basement, just in case Ike wanted to paint. For a five-star general, this was nothing unusual or out of the ordinary—there were, after all, thousands of sergeants in the U.S. Army fully occupied doing things even less useful than waiting until Eisenhower wanted a canvas prepared for his oil paints, and nobody in the Army then or now is likely to question an order from a five-star general.

The Kennedy brothers, however, were civilians at heart, despite their wartime service in the U.S. Navy, and they pretended to be shocked by Ike’s wastefulness; so the sergeant was swiftly removed from his cozy lair in the White House and sent packing. But the story aptly illustrates another side of Ike’s personality—he had, despite simple tastes and a frugality natural to anyone who had lived for many years on a junior officer’s salary, the sense of entitlement of any victorious general. Since the beginning of warfare, the military leaders of successful coalitions have always been substantially rewarded by their grateful countries. In the late seventeenth century John Churchill was made duke of Marlborough, and Blenheim Palace was built and furnished for him at public expense; in the nineteenth century Wellington received not only a dukedom, the Garter, a grand London town house on Hyde Park Corner, and a great country estate, but a sizable fortune to support it all. After World War I, Sir Douglas Haig, whose disastrous military strategy in Flanders was widely believed to have cost the United Kingdom several hundred thousand unnecessary casualties for no discernible gain in ground, received an earldom and was made a wealthy man by his grateful nation. Even in the Soviet Union, those of Stalin’s marshals lucky enough to survive his purges and win him victories in World War II were rewarded with lavish dachas, limousines, orders and decorations mounted with diamonds and precious gemstones, the lifetime support of uniformed aides and servants, and well-paid sine-cures for themselves and their families in the Communist Party and in industry. Only the United States—as the Grants complained in the nineteenth century—had no tradition of rewarding successful generals, except by electing them president.

Neither Eisenhower nor Mrs. Eisenhower would have wanted a dukedom for him, of course, even had it been possible to offer him one, and for some time Eisenhower was not sure whether he wanted the presidency; but even so, by 1945 Ike was no longer a simple hayseed from the Midwest, if he had ever been that, and Mamie understandably expected some compensation for having spent the war alone in a small apartment while he was chauffeured around (alas, all too publicly!) by a glamorous former fashion model. Eisenhower had been a mere lieutenant colonel in 1940 (and a very newly minted one at that), but by 1943 he was on close terms with Roosevelt, Churchill, De Gaulle, and King George VI. He had his own four-engine aircraft and crew at his disposal, not to speak of the beautiful Kay Summersby and her four-door Packard; and although he made a point of living simply, he was nevertheless surrounded by aides and uniformed servants for whom his smallest wishes were commands, and who competed to find for him comfortable, elegant, and restful surroundings. His headquarters in Casablanca, Algiers, London’s posh Grosvenor Square, Bushey Park, and Fontainebleau were in no way Spartan, thanks in part to Kay Summersby, who had considerable experience in the beau monde, knew how to entertain, could hold her own in conversations with Roosevelt or Churchill, and switched from the role of driver to Eisenhower’s hostess as required, in much the same effortless manner that she eventually moved from a British uniform to a faultlessly tailored American WAC officer’s uniform, always slim, cool, sophisticated, and completely devoted to the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe.

There is, let it be said at once, nothing wrong about this—no historical proof exists that generals benefit from being uncomfortable, or produce better strategy by eating bad food, or by being deprived of attractive female company. On the contrary, the commander of a great army—still more the commander of a great coalition, with its infinitely more vexing problems—surely needs an atmosphere in which he can think clearly, and concentrate on victory, as opposed to worrying about his dinner, or wondering whether his bed is dry and clean. It has always been so, and no doubt always will be.

Generals, even those with fewer than five stars, are not like lesser mortals or ordinary people, and although Eisenhower certainly managed, in Kipling’s words, to “Walk with kings—nor lose the common touch,” he was neither as simple nor as easygoing a character as the press (and Republican political strategists) liked to present him. A man who has successfully commanded millions of men in battle, who has made perhaps the most difficult and far-reaching military decision of all time, and who accepted the formal surrender of Nazi Germany, must have a core of steel; a streak of ruthlessness; the ability to make cold, hard, objective decisions; and an imperial sense of command, however well disguised they may be by a big grin and a firm handshake.

This, after all, was a man who had been acclaimed all over the world as the leader of a victorious coalition; who had received deferential congratulations from every world leader, including Stalin, De Gaulle, and George VI; who had been honored at the lord mayor’s banquet in London, where huge crowds gathered in the streets outside to cheer “good old Ike,” then perhaps the most popular American, at home and abroad, of all time. He retired from the Army to become president of Columbia University—a precedent for generals’ becoming university presidents had been set by none other than General Robert E. Lee, who accepted the presidency of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia, after the Civil War—secure in the knowledge that the White House was his almost for the asking, as it had been for Grant, and, for the first time, made financially secure by the sale of his memoirs to Doubleday and Life magazine for unpreceden...